You may have seen concerning messages about applications, including some of ours, that won’t work on future macOS versions. But is that a cause for concern, especially for our freeware apps?

Apple’s deprecation of their Rosetta framework and Intel Macs is specifically about Intel-based hardware and software. Our applications are universal, so they run on both Intel processors and Apple silicon. Therefore, this has no effect on our freeware. Just make sure your apps are up to date, or download them again if needed. The one exception is ThumbsUp, which is currently still an Intel-only app.

To check whether an app is still Intel-based, select it in the Finder, then press ⌘I to open the Get Info pane. In the General section, look at the Kind field. If it reads Application (Apple silicon), that’s perfect. If it says Application (Universal), it should also continue to run on future versions of macOS. Only if it says Application (Intel), you will need to find a newer Apple silicon version, an alternative application, or not upgrade the operating system.

If you want a more detailed list to check all your apps, hold the option key (⌥), click the Apple menu at the upper left of your screen, and choose System Information. Select the Software > Applications section to see your installed applications. In the application list, click the Kind column to sort it, and you can see what native Apple silicon, Universal, or Intel applications you have installed.

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The semester’s back, and so is that particular kind of chaos. New notebooks, forgotten passwords, syllabi that already feel three weeks behind.

Whether you’re a student drowning in PDFs, an educator rebuilding a course from scratch, or a researcher chasing down one elusive citation — the real challenge isn’t learning and researching. It’s keeping track of everything you learn. Notes scattered across apps, papers buried in your downloads folder, half-finished thoughts you swore you’d remember.

This is where a little structure goes a long way. DEVONthink and DEVONthink To Go turn that scattered mess into something you can actually navigate. New term, same tools, better odds of staying on top of it all.

Now is the best time of the year to get prepared for the new school or campus year. Students and educators, get our Mac apps at an exclusive 40 percent discount until September 20th, 2026. You’ll receive the same discount on extensions for your DEVONthink license, too, and the Pro and Server editions of DEVONthink also unlock DEVONthink To Go for iPad and iPhone as long as the license receives updates.

To get the discount, log into your customer account and check if you still have a valid education status. If not, reapply from there. And if you haven’t bought any products from us yet, click the following button to create an account. The discount will be applied automatically as long as you are logged in with an account with a valid education status.

Click here to apply as student or educator

We all spend a lot of time on the Internet and clip content into our DEVONthink databases regularly. But web clipping is not trivial, especially as technologies change. In DEVONthink 4.4 Tycho, we made this a lot better.

Working from the Source

Our clipping now works directly with the loaded web content, giving you more accurate clippings. You should also notice that the captures are faster than before, and the Preview button shows an improved representation of the clipped output, with compatible formats.

Sharing Cookies & Capturing Locally

If you have a bookmark to an authenticated or paywalled site in your database, DEVONthink stores cookies for that site when you log into it. It then passes those cookies to our clipping process, increasing the chances of successful captures from such sites instead of giving you clippings of their login pages.

Previously, when using the clutter-free option when clipping in a browser, it sent a URL to our server that extracted the article. While this worked well enough for many years, our new Markdownifier works directly on your machine, making the round trip unnecessary and the whole process much faster and more private.

Reader View

In addition to improved capture options, DEVONthink 4.4 Tycho brings a new Reader view that lets you view web articles clutter-free. Open it by clicking the page icon in the web view’s navigation bar, selecting View > Document Display > Reader, or pressing ⌃⌘A. A clean view of the article opens in the view/edit pane, similar to what you see in Safari. Capture the contents of the Reader view via the Action (gear icon) menu in the navigation bar, the Tools > Capture menu command, or Clip To DEVONthink.

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The Chat assistant itself got smarter too. With MCP tools enabled, the chat assistant is not limited to the selected items anymore but has access to all your databases (if not excluded from MCP) and most tools of the stand-alone MCP server. Multi-step conversations like these are also noticeably faster and much cheaper now, thanks to improved prompt caching. And, of course, we’ve updated to the latest models from all major AI providers, so whichever one you prefer, you’re chatting with its newest version.

Markdown takes the second spotlight this release. The WYSIWYG editor supports live-edited tables and MathJax equations, not just images and links, and a new syntax colorizer with custom color themes makes source and rendered output easier on the eyes. If you write in LaTeX (or wish you could) you can now export Markdown documents straight to native LaTeX, or typeset them as PDF via pdflatex, resolving WikiLinks and transclusions and carrying your title, author, and date metadata along the way.

Web clipping got a matching upgrade: a new, local Markdownifier and Readability engine make it faster and more accurate, with better handling of navigation, ads, boilerplate, paywalls, and user forums. And when you just want to read something without the clutter, the new Reader view gives you a clean, distraction-free look at bookmarks, HTML documents, and web archives. Open it from the navigation bar, then capture straight from it via Tools > Capture or by printing.

Finally, encrypted and revision-proof databases now use modern APFS disk images on macOS 26.0 Tahoe and later, replacing the older HFS+ format, and the Help viewer’s chat assistant is free in every edition, so anyone can ask it a question while reading the manual.

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An application’s icon is typically considered as just something to click on to launch it. However, many developers add information and commands to the context menu of an app’s Dock icon, and DEVONthink is no exception. Control-click its Dock icon to reveal a useful context menu with these sections/commands:

• Recently opened databases: Quickly reopen databases. The number of databases shown is governed by the number of items specified in System Settings > Menu Bar > Recent documents, applications, and servers.
• Open windows: View, restore, or switch to your open windows. Main windows display as database name — selected item. Document windows show their title. Minimized windows have an unfilled diamond indicator. PDF documents report the number of pages, page size, and magnification; images display pixel dimensions, resolution, and magnification.
• New Window: Open a new window for a database chosen in the submenu listing all your open databases.
• Take Note: Opens the Take Note view of the Sorter to create or continue working on a note.
• Start/Stop Server: For those using the Server edition, lets you easily start and stop the websharing component.

Below these app-specific commands, you’ll find standard macOS options, such as keeping the icon pinned to the Dock, assigning DEVONthink to a specific desktop space, or quitting the app.

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One of those topics we often talk about in support and on our forums is being diligent about backups. At a minimum, an external hard drive and Time Machine are much better than no backups. But for a more robust backup strategy, think: 3-2-1. The 3-2-1 backup strategy is a good way to minimize data loss. Simply stated: keep three copies of your data, on two different types of media, with one copy stored offsite. Here’s a quick overview, with your DEVONthink databases as the example.

Three copies of your data: One copy is the database you’re working on. The second copy is on your primary backup. We advocate a local backup using an external hard drive and Time Machine or a similar snapshot-style backup application. This gives you immediate access to your backups in an emergency. The third copy is a redundant backup.

Backed up to two separated media: Your two backups should be stored on different media, ideally on a different type of media. So, if your primary backup is on an external hard drive, the second backup could be a network-attached storage (NAS) or an online backup via an appropriate backup application, e.g., Arq. But of course, a second external drive is better than no redundant backup.

With one offsite copy: An offsite copy is a safety measure in case of extreme circumstances. Fire, theft, floods, weather, etc. can affect a single geographic location, leaving you in a situation where your local backups, including redundant ones, could be lost. Many people still store backup hard drives in a separate physical location like a safety deposit box in a bank. Sounds old-fashioned, but that can come in handy if the worst happens. If your third copy is online, that counts as an offsite backup.

We hope this encourages you to stop and take a look at your data safety and start or resume your backups today!

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We previously wrote about replacing text in documents in DEVONthink, which is mainly useful within single documents. Handling items one-by-one works fine for small batches, but it quickly becomes slower and more error-prone as your volume grows. However, you can easily change certain texts in multiple items using a batch process. To do that:

1. Select some items you want to rename.
2. Now select Tools > Batch Process > Batch Process and press the plus button (+) to start a new configuration.
3. Choose the Find & Replace action.
4. Select Name, click Edit, and enter the text to change and its replacement. For example, replace devonthink with DEVONthink. Enable Case Insensitive if you want all capitalizations to be changed.
5. Click the Apply button and the name is changed.

The action works on names, URLs, item aliases, and Finder comments. This feature is used very often, for example, to rename multiple documents at once. Or, if you’re using the Pro or Server edition, it works on custom metadata attributes too. Imagine you have an attribute for your creditors. Early on you entered BestBuy and later changed it. To clean things up, select the documents and choose the attribute, e.g., Creditor, and define the replacement: BestBuy becomes Best Buy. When you apply it, that metadata will change for all the selected documents. Documents already using Best Buy remain untouched since they don’t match the criteria.

Logically, if you have different repeated replacements, you can create a new configuration for each one. And if this is a replacement you do often, you can quickly access it via the Tools > Batch Process menu or via the context menu in the item list. It’s also possible to assign a hotkey to make running it even quicker!

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When creating automations in DEVONthink, the processes are defined in simple, unvarying step-by-step instructions. The Pro and Server editions have an additional specialized smart action called Chat – Continue if that uses external AI to determine if a process should continue.

Available in smart rules and batch processing, this action can assess some input, optionally including a document. You define a question to a chat model that can be answered either positively or negatively. If the answer is positive, subsequent actions are executed; if the answer is negative, they are not. You can also use placeholders in your query by clicking the three-dot icon on the right side of the input field.

You can ask straightforward fact-checking questions, for example, Is this document an invoice? Or ask more qualitative, reasoning-based questions like, Does this document present important information in a way a layperson can easily understand? As a practical example, you could construct a prompt to check if a document is from a list of known vendors: Is this a receipt from one of these vendors: Apple, Guitar Center, Target, … As subsequent actions, you define what should happen if the answer is positive.

Two important things to remember:

• Phrase your prompt to elicit a binary “yes/no”, “true/false” answer. A prompt like Is this document about astronomy or astronauts? is not an appropriate inquiry. However, adding Reply ONLY with yes or no can help focus things.
• A smart rule or batch process continues only when the action returns a positive result. If the smart action returns a negative result, the smart rule or batch process will not continue. Imagine parsing RSS articles: if you prompt with Is this article about AI? then use a subsequent action with Is this article about macOS?, the article must first be positively detected as being about AI in order to assess if it’s also about macOS.

Remember AI isn’t infallible (as you’ve surely noticed before) and its qualitative assessment may be “more yes than no” but not definitively “yes”. For these types of prompts, you can also include a phrase like Answer no if you aren't confident.

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When creating searchable documents from images or PDF documents in DEVONthink Pro or Server, there are two mechanisms that process them: Apple’s Vision framework or traditional OCR. While seemingly similar in output, there are important differences between them.

Vision

Apple’s Vision framework examines an image and recognizes text in it. It stores this in an index, letting you find the document by its text while not affecting the actual file. This can apply to a standalone image or to a page image within a PDF document. However, Vision stores the text locally, so sharing the document with someone, e.g., on a PC with no Live Text function, gives them just the PDF without any text data.

In DEVONthink’s Settings > Files > Import > Recognize, the Make text in PDF documents searchable feature uses Vision to process image-based PDFs (like scanned pages) when you import such documents. The text will be stored in the index of DEVONthink, so if you export the PDF, it will no longer be searchable. Also, you can choose a Vision model in the AI > Transcription > Images settings that processes images, e.g., on import, or via Data > Recognition > Transcribe Text & Notes.

We recommend only enabling these options if you need them, especially as they will process every incoming image or PDF document. You can always use the features on a case-by-case basis.

Traditional OCR

Traditional OCR generates a text layer and applies it to the document, or, more commonly, creates a new document. The processed document can be shared or moved to other devices and remains searchable since the text layer is part of it. This is much more robust and makes it a more broadly useful feature.

Traditional OCR doesn’t happen on import but can be accomplished manually via Data > OCR or by using smart rules. It uses the OCR settings for resolution, output, etc.

How to find out what needs OCR?

In both cases, OCR and Vision, a PDF document may show it has words in it, including in the Tools > Inspectors > Concordance. For Vision-processed files, this information comes from the index, not the document itself. So when trying to identify PDF documents that need OCR, the correct criteria for a DEVONthink search is Kind is PDF/PS and Word Count is 0 since Vision documents have no text layer, therefore no words.

You may also want to have a look at our tip How to Deal With PDF Searchability.

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In the Pro and Server editions of DEVONthink, you can create personalized stamps to mark your PDFs and images. Imprint your documents, for example, with a name, date, location, or an item link. Or use custom metadata to imprint your documents with bibliographic data such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

In a new tutorial, we show you how to create and use these imprints in DEVONthink. Choose Help > Tutorials to access the tutorial in our Support Assistant. For more information on imprinting, see the Settings > Imprinter section of the built-in Help or the user handbook.

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If you frequently read in DEVONthink To Go and prefer reading in fullscreen view, things just got better with its new Zen mode.

Zen mode hides the application’s interface (the chrome) for distraction-free reading. To switch to Zen mode, show a document, e.g., a PDF document, then select ••• > Enter Zen Mode. Alternatively, enable Enter Zen mode on tap in the document’s View Options menu (three sliders) or in Settings > Documents, and tap a non-interactive part of the document. The interface disappears, leaving just the document to read.

When you enter Zen mode, a notice appears at the top of the screen: Tap for tools, double-tap to exit. If you want to exit Zen mode quickly, double-tap at the top of the screen. If you want to annotate or edit the document, tap once at the top of the screen and the toolbars reappear so you can work on the document. Also, the toolbar button with two inward-facing diagonal arrows exits Zen mode.

Lastly, if you want to disable that documents switch to Zen mode when you just touch them, disable the option the Settings. You can also quickly turn this global setting on and off via the View Options menu.

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When using AI on mobile devices, you typically access cloud services like Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT. You can’t run a full local model on an iPhone today, but you can run one on your Mac and connect DEVONthink To Go to it.

First, your AI application needs to make itself accessible on the network. Look in the application’s Settings or its help for terms to that effect. You also need to enable Local Network access for DEVONthink To Go in the OS’ Settings > Privacy & Security. If needed, make sure to allow the connection in your firewall or network application.

Using LM Studio as our example, open its Developer view, load a model, and ensure the server is running. You will see a http://localhost:1234 or http://127.0.0.1:1234 URL appear. It’s a self-reference that AI-enabled applications on your Mac can use to connect to LM Studio running on the same machine. But other devices are not your Mac, therefore you can’t use that URL in DEVONthink To Go. However, it is possible to connect our mobile application to an AI application on your Mac.

Back in LM Studio’s Developer view, click the Server Settings button, and enable Serve on Local Network. You will see the URL change to an proper IP address. Click the copy icon to copy the URL.

In DEVONthink To Go’s Settings > AI, choose LM Studio. It will be pre-populated with a URL. Select everything before the colon and either paste or type in the protocol and IP address, e.g., http://192.168.12.185. Make sure that the port, e.g., :1234, doesn’t appear twice, because the copied URL could already include it. It should connect to LM Studio on your Mac and display the available models you have loaded.

Note, however, that IP addresses can change, and when it does, you would have to update the URL in the settings. However, you can instead use the Bonjour name of your Mac. So instead of using the IP address, you can enter, e.g., http://leonidasx.local. Now the URL will remain valid even if the IP address changes.

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Quickly navigate your databases with your favorites right on the databases list. Color groups and tags and order documents manually if needed. The chat can highlight text passages and ignores documents from databases you exclude. You can also open a chat for multiple selected documents. We’ve updated the support for many AI models, too, added GPT 5.5 Pro and the Xiaomi models, and removed outdated ones.

Set a default font for text, Markdown, rich text, and formatted notes documents, and adjust the line height. Floating statistics show character, word, and paragraph counts. If you’re working with Markdown, the renderer/parser of version 4.2 is more compliant with common Markdown features, faster, and more reliable. We’ve also revisited the search to make it more complete and more compatible with DEVONthink for Mac. It finds documents with attached chats, too.

In addition, we have revised many icons and menu commands throughout the app for consistency. The main menu lets you directly access information about the app, the integrated help pages, the tips we regularly post on our blog, and send us feedback.

Of course, we’ve improved the overall reliability and performance, and fixed bugs and glitches.

You can find a complete list of all improvements in Settings > Help > Read Me inside the app. The New & Improved page also highlights what’s new in each feature release. We recommend this update to all users of DEVONthink To Go. The App Store will either install the update automatically for you or you can find it in the Updates area of the App Store app. If you are still using an older generation of DEVONthink To Go, version 4 is a new app and you’ll need to install it manually. DEVONthink To Go 4 is included with every license for DEVONthink 4 Pro or Server for Mac as long as it receives updates.

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When you get a new Mac, your user account gets set up for day-to-day use, whether for work or play. But adding a second user account has some real benefits. And while it may sound complicated, it is straightforward to do.

1. Open System Settings > Users & Groups.
2. Click Add User (you may need to authenticate with your admin password).
3. Choose an account type. For technical support or your own use, we recommend using an Administrator account. For family, employees, etc., use Standard.
4. Enter the Full Name (which appears as the login) name. You can accept the automatically suggested Account Name (the name of the home directory) or change it.
5. Enter and verify the Password for the account login, then click Create User.
6. Optionally, enable Fast User Switching in the Menu Bar settings. This makes it easy to move between user accounts as needed.
7. Log into the new account and set it up. macOS prompts you to sign in with an Apple ID, but it’s optional. You can skip it or use a different Apple ID for this account.

So when is this actually useful?

• Troubleshooting: If an app misbehaves, log into the new account and check whether the problem occurs there. If it doesn’t, the issue is likely confined to your original user account (preferences, caches, or user-level settings). A separate administrator account can also be useful if you need to take your Mac to someone for hardware maintenance.
• Personal/Professional Separation: If you’re using your Mac for business and personal use, designate the new account for one of those uses. If you have a work-related Apple ID, sign into it, and keep your work and life documents separated.
• Multiple Users: In business settings where employees share Macs between shifts, each employee can have their own user account on the same Mac. At home, you can make an account for your family members or a guest account. In such cases, it’s common to create a Standard account and implement stricter controls on things like installing applications or the amount of screen time.

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Joe Kissel from Take Control Books has published the fourth quaterly update for his ebook Take Control of DEVONthink 4. It now covers DEVONthink 4.3.2 and DEVONthink To Go 4.1.3. The changes include our new MCP Server, our widgets for iOS, iPadOS, and the Mac, as well as support for RSS feeds in DEVONthink To Go.

Download Take Control of DEVONthink 4 for free from our Handbooks and Extras page or directly from Take Control Books.

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You might assume that our applications will do certain things automatically, such as performing OCR on imported files. However, many decisions are yours to make, not the software’s. We prefer clear opt‑in controls rather than hidden opt‑outs. Several features or actions in DEVONthink or DEVONthink To Go require setup on your part before they function on their own. These are the most common ones:

• Sync: Not every database needs to be synced. You must set the same sync location on each device running DEVONthink or DEVONthink To Go, then choose which databases to sync. If you create new databases, manually enable them for syncing or import them from the sync location. For more information, have a look at our sync checklist for DEVONthink.
• AI: Nothing is enabled by default, because AI always remains a private matter. If you want to use external AI, set up a connection to your provider in the AI settings and obtain any required API keys. You can also choose task-specific models, e.g., for summarization.
• Automation: In DEVONthink, you must manually run automations or configure their event triggers. Scripts and batch processes must be run manually. Newly installed, created, or duplicated smart rules initially use the On Demand trigger. Add other triggers, e.g., On Import, if you want them to run automatically.
• OCR: DEVONthink does not automatically OCR every image or PDF on import. Set up a smart rule to detect those documents and run OCR. To make incoming scans from a known scanning software searchable, switch on Settings > OCR > Convert Incoming Scans. In DEVONthink To Go, enable OCR > Make scans searchable for in-app scans.

In the Settings, our applications give you precise control over many options, including automatically importing email attachments, scheduling RSS updates, creating thumbnails, or transcribing media files. We believe you should decide how much an app does on its own.

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Using MCP (Model Context Protocol) you can make the data stored in DEVONthink (Pro and Server) and many of its abilities availble to your preferred AI client, e.g., Claude or Codex. But how does MCP work, how do you enable it, and what can you actually do with it? Two new tutorials get you started: Understanding MCP and Using AI Skills.

Select Help > Tutorials in the menu of DEVONthink Pro and Server to access them. And if you want to learn more about the topic, take a look at the Getting Started > AI Explained section of the built-in Help or user handbook. You can also find more articles about using generative AI in DEVONthink here in our blog.

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You can automate work in DEVONthink both interactively and unattended. Smart rules and reminders both support time-based actions. Smart rules’ time-based triggers run at intervals: every minute, hourly, daily, weekly. This is great for tasks that can run within a general timeframe, e.g., “This needs to be done sometime tomorrow”. But reminders have the advantage when precise scheduling is needed.

Reminders let you set exact times, days, and well-defined recurrences. You’ll have these options:

• Once: only trigger an alarm once.
• Hourly: run at a chosen time and interval.
• Daily: run at a chosen time, with a configurable day interval.
• Weekly: pick days of the week and interval (e.g., every two weeks).
• Monthly: choose a calendar day or an occurrence (e.g., second Thursday).
• Yearly: select months and occurrences.

While reminders have fewer built-in actions than smart rules, they still support a range of practical alarms: play a sound, send an email, open a document, or run a script. If you plan to automate via scripting, see Automation > Reminder Scripts in the Help for examples and details.

Imagine you have a timesheet you’d need to open every Friday before you leave work. Maybe you want to open the stock page in your browser every morning at 9:30 am. Or how about optimizing and creating a database archive on the last Sunday of each month? You can precisely schedule all these things with reminders. Add a reminder to a document in its Info > Annotations & Reminders inspector.

For broader, event-driven automation and reminders when you need more precise timing use smart rules. Pick the one that fits how precisely your task needs to be scheduled.

Note: Enable Settings > General > Enable reminder alarms to ensure your alarms will function properly.

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DEVONthink lets you use several common file formats: PDF documents for reading, rich text and Markdown for writing, and many more. But if you need to record information in a spreadsheet-style format, we also have a native format for that: sheets.

A DEVONthink sheet is a file format for displaying tabular data in an accessible and editable way. If you have ever used Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers, sheets will look familiar to you. Composed of user-definable columns and rows, it is useful for keeping records on a variety of topics, like genealogy, software licenses, customer information, bibliographic data, and more. You can find some useful example sheets in DEVONthink’s Data > New from Template menus, e.g., Education > Books.

Create a sheet via the Data > New menu. Define the columns you need by giving each a name and choosing a data type, e.g., text, date and time, URL, country, a Boolean (checkbox) option, and more. Or if you have a TSV (tab-separated values) or CSV (comma-separated values) file, you can import and use it as a sheet. Work on a sheet by clicking a cell and entering the information. Tab to the next column, or press ⏎ to create a new record or jump to the next row. You can edit the columns, add or delete rows via the Tools > Sheets commands or the buttons in the Editing bar above the view/edit pane.

When viewing a sheet, you can click the column headers to sort on that column. For Pro and Server users, you can use the View > Document Display > Form View to view each record as a form, a view familiar to FileMaker users.

One thing to be aware of: despite the similar appearance to Excel or Numbers, sheets are plain text under the hood and don’t support advanced features like formulae or conditional formatting.

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One year after the release of DEVONthink 4.0 many of you have received a notice that your license will soon no longer receive updates. When the time has come, exactly nothing will happen to DEVONthink on your Mac and your databases. The app will happily continue to work as it has and might even receive a maintenance update or two; only starting with the next feature update, it will no longer install those^*.

So there’s no need to hurry up if you don’t need to be on the forefront right now. You can extend your license with another year of updates at any time in the future, whenever it fits.

However, if you do plan to extend your license with updates, you may want to do it before the time has run out. Extending in time gives you 10% discount on the price for one year of updates but also the option to extend by two years with 20% discount and even three years with 30% off. While we sometimes do promotions giving discounts, the option to extend by two or three years at once is only available while your license still receives updates.